‘That’s one word for it.’
‘What did you do?’
‘I just quietly walked away and promptly threw up behind a tree. And then I walked home feeling devastated.’
‘Oh dear. You poor thing. Look. I don’t know what the explanation is, but there must be one.’
‘Yeah. Well, I thought the same at first and then I’ve been over and over it and nothing springs to mind.’
‘Maybe they were getting ready in the classroom for a diving demonstration?’
‘Maybe not. Juliette, these are elite professionals. It’s not like he’s teaching them how to put an oxygen tank on. I’ve seen some of the diagrams in that classroom. This is serious stuff. And why would he have been standing there in front of her?’
Juliette reached over and helped herself to another one of Dimitri's Greek biscuits. ‘Cripes. I just don’t know. Have you heard from him?’
‘That’s the thing. We were meant to be going to the pub this evening but he’s cancelled. He said something has come up.’
‘Yikes. Literally.’
Lottie sighed out. ‘Actually, I’ll just reply now. I can’t face it at the moment, plus I don’t want him seeing me like this. A pathetic, red-eyed heap. I’ll just say okay and then see how I feel in the morning,’ Lottie said and taking her phone out of her pocket she texted back a simple message saying okay to Connor and left it at that.
‘You need to talk to him,’ Juliette said.
‘I know. I just feel pathetic and sad. It was all going so well, too.’
‘Don’t give up. Hopefully, there is a reasonable explanation.’
‘I really hope so, but I won’t be holding my breath.’
Chapter 61
It was a couple of days later and Lottie had put her head down to catch up with all the preparations for the next Secret Evenings event, and had messaged Connor that she needed to have a chat with him and they had arranged to meet in the Sandy Hotel.
The day after the classroom episode, he’d been scheduled to go to Scotland for a couple of days, and after cancelling the Smugglers drinks, as far as he was concerned nothing had changed and Lottie had received the usual texts from him that she’d been used to since the night on the canal boat.
But everything had changed for Lottie. The few days with Connor being away and having calmed down after the afternoon of pretty much non-stop crying, Lottie had decided that her full-blown love affair with Connor was going to be just that. An affair. An affair that would no longer be.
As far as she was concerned, the drink they had planned that evening when he arrived home from Scotland was not a ‘chat’ for her to find out what had gone on and listen to an explanation. Lottie was going to tell Conor that she was no longer interested and that she had realised that the whole thing had been a big mistake.
She had felt a dreadful, all-encompassing sadness mixed with what she now recognised was stupidity. Stupid that she thought he was in as deep as she was and stupid that she had even given him a chance and more importantly let herself go.
Lottie had decided that it was easier and much less painful for her already broken heart if she finished it with Connor sooner rather than later whatever the thing in the classroom turned out to be.
The day had gone past in cooking, baking, cleaning and dinner deliveries and when Lottie arrived back on Strawberry Hill at five-thirty she almost didn’t have it in her to meet with Connor for the ‘chat.’
She climbed wearily up the stairs, ran the bath, attempted to try and soak away some of her weariness, and walked back into her bedroom to get dressed. She opened her underwear drawer and smiled wryly at the M & S lingerie neatly folded on the top. What an irony that turned out to be.
As Lottie dried her hair and looked in the mirror what was left of the eyelash extensions looked back at her. She must have lost her mind. She’d been that caught up in the excitement of that first date and being sprinkled with gold that it was almost like she’d escaped from reality doing things like visiting Pretty Beach Beauty and going shopping with Juliette for new things.
Years ago, Lottie had laughed to herself reading an article whilst in the waiting room of the dentist all about how the rush of chemicals and hormones that flood your brain and body when you are in love can make you do things you wouldn’t normally do. Charlie had passed away and Lottie had remembered thinking how she would never feel those chemicals again. Now she had and had done exactly what that article had discussed. She’d done crazy things like fall into Connor’s bed, shove things in her face and prance around in underwear to improve her self-esteem.
She shook her head. She should have stayed in her own little world of greenhouses and plants. Without the hormones and the chemicals and remained stroking vegetables instead of stroking other things.
***
Lottie walked down Strawberry Hill and made her way to the hotel. The bright and cheerful exterior with the window boxes brimming with white and pink flowers and the hanging baskets lined up along the front did nothing to improve Lottie’s dour mood.
She pushed open the big, shiny black double door, stepped into the lobby, and walked through to the bar. A pianist played in the corner and the whole place simmered with quiet chatting. A couple sat at the bar with a champagne bucket between them, a waiter in black trousers and crisp white shirt wore a long black apron and carried a tray above his head, and over in the far corner Connor was sitting with a pint in the bay window right at the end.
Lottie approached the table, tried to make herself appear perky and took a deep breath in. As soon as Connor saw her he jumped up from his seat, took a couple of steps towards her, touched her gently on the elbow, kissed her cheek, and showed her to her seat.
‘Hi, Lottie, how are you?’
‘Good thanks, Connor.’
‘You look a bit off colour.’
Tends to happen when the man you thought was your partner gets caught in an uncompromising position. Lottie thought to herself grimly.
‘Yeah I am a bit, actually,’ Lottie replied.
‘You and me both, Lottie, I’ve had a nightmare at work.’
‘Oh, really?’
Don’t I know it. Though I wouldn’t have called it a nightmare for you.
‘Well, when I was meant to meet you the other day at the Smugglers for a drink that didn’t happen because there was a situation at work that escalated very quickly and I had to deal with it right away.’
‘What sort of situation?’
Connor let out a big sigh and leant forward onto the table. ‘Okay, listen to me, don’t ask any questions and just wait till I finish, it’s not good and you are definitely not going to like it.’
Lottie felt fairly sure that she knew what was coming. It had to be about the thing she had seen.
Lottie sat forward in her chair and gripped onto her glass. So, there was a situation. What was he going to tell her? Maybe there was an explanation for this after all. Lottie looked Connor up and down. There was no denying he was absolutely gorgeous and even after what she had seen she loved sitting in front of him. Something happened to her when she was around him and it was the reason why she’d let herself fall in too deeply in the first place.
‘So, I had an elite group from the government, not from the Navy, more specialist than the Navy divers. These are at the top of their game. The training was something with new technology that I and only another handful of divers in the country know how to use. The group was three men and a woman. A woman going by the name of Ella Lawpon.’
OMG! Where is this going? He’s actually talking about her!
‘Right. And one of them caused a bit of a situation did they?’
‘You could say that, yep.’
Lottie took a huge gulp of her wine. ‘Go on.’
‘It turned out that Ella Lawpon, how do I say? Took a shine to me.’
Lottie shifted awkwardly in her seat. ‘What do you mean, precisely?’
She just whipped off her top and started fondling in front of
you? Yeah, nah. I’m not falling for that.
Connor closed his eyes briefly, shook his head and sighed even louder this time.
‘I’ll just cut straight to the chase. The other three went to get some sausage rolls from Holly’s at morning tea, which was very late because we’d run over. Ella Lawpon decided that she would stay where she was.’
‘Okay...’
‘And she looked out the window watching them go and I went out to make the coffee and when I came back there was something, errm, missing.’
Lottie knew exactly what had been missing.
‘Like what?’
‘Like her top. Like her top, and underneath there was no bra.’
Lottie spluttered and coughed. So he was going straight in for the kill. He was relaying it exactly as Lottie had seen it. This Ella Lawpon had been standing there at the desk still in her trousers but with no top.
‘You may well cough. I actually had something similar once before. Years ago. So I was well prepared.’
Lottie couldn’t believe it. Of all the things that had gone through her mind, this wasn’t it.
‘What did you do?’ Lottie asked.
‘I told her to put her top back on.’
Lottie listened attentively, incredulous as to how this was turning out. She had not thought the ‘chat’ was going to go this way at all. In fact, she’d hardly said a word since she’d walked in.
‘But she didn’t listen. And then she moved closer and told me that she knew that I wanted her and invited me to... Well, I’ll let your imagination fill you in on the actual words she used,’ Connor said, raising his eyebrows and shaking his head back and forth.
‘Christ.’
‘The thing is...’
Oh here we go. The thing is, I just thought I would, to keep her quiet.
‘When I said that I didn’t want to know, she didn’t like it. Like, really didn’t like it. And she moved closer to me and pressed herself against me. At which point the other guys came back, opened the door and walked in on what looked like me with my student with her top off.’
Connor looked visibly perturbed.
‘And then what?’
‘I moved her away and she made out as if it was all me. One of the guys got very stroppy and went for me.’
‘Oh. My. God!’
‘Yeah. Bit of an idiot really. Not blowing my own trumpet but I’m six foot two and elite trained.’
Lottie nodded taking in the biceps in front of her.
Trust me. I know you are.
‘Then what happened?’
‘I wrapped the whole thing up. Told Ella to leave. Explained what had happened to the other three who remained and then they left too. The thing was, to make it worse, she didn't go quietly and the one who got really angry phoned his senior officer and made a formal complaint against me.’
‘No one’s going to believe it, Connor.’
No one including me.
‘They don’t need to believe me. That’s why I had to cancel our drinks. I had to sort it all out. Absolute frigging nightmare. I had to talk to the guys in head office. Blah, blah, blah.’
‘What do you mean? They don’t need to believe you? Why not? Surely if she’s saying those things it will go further, won’t it?’
‘She can say whatever she damn well likes. I have state of the art hidden cameras and microphones installed in every inch of that building. I don’t need anyone to believe me at all. The evidence is right there for anyone to see. I have the whole thing on CCTV.’
Lottie Cloudberry opened her eyes very wide and sank back quietly in her chair.
Chapter 62
The next day, Lottie stood in the greenhouse watering her tomato plant seedlings while Dimitri sat beside her at the potting table and went through the list of everything for the next event.
‘I think that’s it, then. Once you’ve finished that watering I want to pop down there and have one last check through,’ Dimitri stated.
‘Okay. Won’t be a sec,’ Lottie said as she refilled her watering can, held it up over the top of her pots and watered the seedlings.
‘You seem brighter, today. You’ve really not been looking yourself the last few days,’ Dimitri said to her in Greek.
‘Yes. I was a bit under the weather. You know with all this work we’ve got on. I’m better now though after last night.’
‘I noticed that as soon as you came back from the pub with Connor you were looking better. Instantly perked you up, did he?’
You could say that. Now that the riddle of the mysterious topless woman has been solved.
‘He certainly did.’
‘Good.’
‘Okay. Let’s go over there and have a look,’ Lottie replied as she put the watering can back on a hook overhead.
They walked down to the outbuildings through the bottom and up to the room in the eaves. The old candelabras Lottie had found in the attic were now dotted throughout the room. Lottie, with Dimitri’s help, had slowly carted them all the way down from the attic, and through the house to the outbuildings where she’d spent two days cleaning and researching online how best to get the sparkle back from the glass. They now all hung majestically over the tables, the candles and glass twinkling against the old antique patina.
The cafe tables from Suntanned Pete’s were now in situ and the huge old shop display dresser Lottie had rescued from the skip, which looked much bigger in the room than it had in the street, was clean, the mirrors at the back gleaming, and the glass doors shining.
Stacks of vintage china stood inside the dresser, piles of vintage glasses were lined up on top and big white pots held antique silver knives and forks from Lottie’s vast collection.
A vast antique mirror stood on the left-hand wall together with twelve substantial botanical prints framed in rustic white surrounds. Tucked in beside them an old grandfather clock Lottie had whitewashed sat overlooking the whole scene.
The three enormous windows in the eaves which were now clean and sparkling framed unobstructed views down to the sea, the tables clustered casually around them.
‘Everything in here is done then. Correct?’ Dimitri checked.
‘Yup. We’ll need the final vacuum on the day and that’s it. How wonderful is it to have our own venue and not have to do all that carting around?’
Dimitri put his phone and tablet on the table, looked around, and answered Lottie in Greek. ‘Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. We’ll be able to shut the door at the end of the night and do all the cleaning and sorting the next day.’
‘Oh, yes. That will be the best part. The part when we are exhausted and can shut it up if we like.’
Dimitri nodded and they then made their way down the stairs, checked everything in the back room they’d turned into a kitchen and Lottie's phone started ringing.
‘Hello Juliette. How are you?’
‘Hi. I’m good.’
‘What are you up to?’ Juliette asked.
‘Just going through everything for the next event.’
‘I was just calling to see how it went with Connor.’
‘It’s all okay, but we need a chat.’
‘I’m in the laneway for my lunch. Do you want to meet me for a cup of tea in Maisy’s?’
Lottie checked the time on her phone. ‘Yep. I’ll see you there in about fifteen minutes?’
‘Great, see you then. I’ll order the tea.’
Fifteen minutes later and Lottie had sailed down Strawberry Hill Lane on her bike, ridden through the Old Town, along through Mermaids and down the laneway until she got to Maisy’s. She locked up her bike, pushed open the door to Maisy’s and saw Juliette sitting at a table in the window.
‘Hi,’ Lottie said as Juliette got up and kissed her on the cheek.
‘Hi. Blimey the suspense is nearly killing me,’ Juliette kidded.
‘Ahh. You won’t believe it. You couldn’t make it up.’
‘Ooh. Well you seem okay so it can’t be all bad.’
‘It’s not,’ Lottie agreed as she sat down.
Lottie stirred her tea and began to regale the whole story of topless Ella, Connor’s reaction and then told Juliette how Connor wasn’t at all concerned because the whole thing had been captured on CCTV. Juliette sat and listened attentively with her eyes wide and chin nearly on the floor for the whole debrief.
‘What a little madam,’ Juliette remarked once Lottie had finally come to the end.
‘I know.’
‘So, how are you feeling about it all?’
Lottie put her chin on her hand and sighed. ‘I can’t lie. It’s changed things for me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I feel more cautious. When I stood there looking through that window it was like I went to stone.’
Juliette nodded and took another sip of her tea.
‘I just realised that I’d gone into all this like the clappers. I thought he felt the same.’
‘Surely how he reacted meant that he does?’
‘Yes, you’d think that. But it just put the willies up me. Jools, I pretty much jumped into his bed without looking back. I don’t even know that much about him.’
‘Hmm.’
‘I mean, look at the CCTV thing for a start. What, the whole place is recorded all the time? Why? He has his own security team. I didn’t know that. He didn’t tell me. Not that it came up, but what else don’t I know?’
‘Yeah, I see what you mean. So, getting back to that. The CCTV bit. Have you actually seen the footage?’
‘A clip of it. Yes,’ Lottie replied, getting out her phone. ‘Not sure if I should show you but what the heck,’ Lottie said and found the clip on her phone and held it on the table so that they could both see it.
They watched the clip to see Connor walk into the classroom at Pretty Beach Diving with a trayful of mugs and a plate of biscuits. As he walks in, he sees Ella Lawpon without her top on, backs away, puts the tray down on a desk and tells her to back off. She presumably, from what the footage shows, tries again and Connor holds his hands up and the footage shows her shaking her head and attempting to get closer to Connor when the door opens and the other students walk in.
Secret Evenings in Pretty Beach Page 25
